New Arrivals
Wilderness of Mirrors
2023 stock. Wilderness of Mirrors is the new album from Lawrence English. This album has been two years in the making and the first album created since the release of his 2011 ode to J.A. Baker's novel, The Peregrine. It is English's most tectonic auditory offering to date, an unrelenting passage of colliding waves of harmony and dynamic live instrumentation. The phrase, "wilderness of mirrors," draws its root from T.S. Eliot's elegant poem "Gerontion." During the Cold War, the phrase became ass…
Cruel Optimism
Cruel Optimism is a record that considers power (present and absent). It meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility. This pyramid is an affective ecology of the (ever)present moment. This edition owes its title and its origins to the wonderful text of the same name by American theorist Lauren Berlant. I had the fortune to come across her writing almost a half-decade ago. In Cruel Optimism, I found a number of cri…
Elegant & Detached
2023 stock. This is the second full-length album from U.S. sound installation artist Richard Chartier aka Pinkcourtesyphone. Pinkcourtesyphone is an echo of an unfamiliar voice. Pinkcourtesyphone remembers two things you hold up to your face as a conduit to forgotten love. Pinkcourtesyphone permeates like a syrup-y dream. Pinkcourtesyphone is many things from many places. Pinkcourtesyphone is elegant and detached. This is the second full-length call from the Pinkcourtesyphone-line; a loquacious …
Orang-Utan
With this reissue of “Orang-Utan” by legendary bassist and cello player Isao Suzuki, Le Tres Jazz Club offers a remarkable and highly sought-after free jazz album. Bassist Isao Suzuki's popularity shot up to stratosphere with the release of Blow Up from the Three Blind Mice label. By the time he recorded this, fourth album for the label, he was actually the winner of the Swing Journal Readers' Poll. And this rather strangely titled album doesn't disappoint.Suzuki had a knack for surrounding hims…
Fluid To The Influence
Restock 2023. CD version. Chris Abrahams returns with Fluid To The Influence. Building upon the foundation of his previous three editions for Room40, Abrahams charts out a divergent course through lilting piano flows, distended organ passages, thunderous electronic eruptions, and focused concrète explorations. Fluid To The Influence spans a huge spectrum of sound, each movement calling forward to the next in a flowing motion that demonstrates Abrahams's commitment to and interest in the album as…
Nowhere
2023 Stock. New Rome, the latest project from Polish composer Tomasz Bednarczyk, presents Nowhere. In the late 2000s, Bednarczyk emerged with a trilogy of electronic records that set pastoral-tonality against grainy smears of pulse and rhythm. His previous Room40 editions Summer Feelings and Painting Sky Together were lilting, melancholic affairs, littered with a deeply personal approach to music making that felt as therapeutic as it did artistic. In hindsight, they were records that stamped out…
Sam Jesteś Pompa Vol. 2
Remont Pomp (repair of pumps) is a band playing ethnic, avant-garde and improvised music, which was founded in 2003 at the Polish Association for People with Intellectual Disabilities Koło in Gdańsk, created by the association's charges. The band's inspiration is ethnic music with an emphasis on the richness of African music. Remont Pomp also discovers the space of experimental music by playing unusual instruments and objects not usually associated with music. The band uses a variety of instrume…
Improvisações Cristalizadas
*300 copies limited edition* Unreleased but perfectly formed "hidden" album, recorded in 1989-90 by Nuno Rebelo on the wake of his "Sagração Do Mês De Maio" double LP (composed in 1988 as soundtrack to the third Manobras de Maio fashion event in Lisbon). The tracks convey a sense of investigative curiosity regarding computer composition and they sound wonderfully artificial. Titles as "Moon OK", "Tiny Space Ships" or "Dança Das Creaturas Elásticas" ("Elastic Creatures Dance") embody this idea of…
Moments at the Re-engage
*Limited edition of 100 copies.* The British producer Alex Smalley (aka Olan Mill) has been active for more than a decade building his signature through nature as the central theme across emotional journeys through beautiful ambient melodies. Moments at the Re-engage —his first publication in Umor Rex— was created for a performance in Thüringen, Germany. On the night, while the audience was floating in mineralized neon water, the sound was being diffused across submerged speakers. Multiple synth…
Enginn Gleypir Sólina
In February 1993, at artist Hannes Lárusson’s Gallerí 11 in Reykjavik, Magnús Pálsson exhibited two installations, one in each of the gallery’s two rooms. In the first was Enginn Gleypir Sólina (No One Swallows The Sun). In the adjacent room was its companion work Herra Túrpur Jónsson (Mister Túrpur Jónsson). Each room featured four wall-mounted loudspeakers, one in each corner emanating vocalized grunts, sighs, and syllables in between extensive passages of Icelandic and nonsensical language. O…
Scald - Live 2022
3xCD set of Anthropology Band live in 2022 at the Newcastle Festival Of Jazz And Improvised Music and at Café Oto, London. The band's current 8 piece line up was on fiery form for both gigs, playing a mixture of both old and new material to full houses. With the electric 70s music of Miles Davis as its starting point and the improvised abstraction of AACM as its end point, these recording show a band growing out of the studio and going from strength to strength as it hits the stage.
Circus Parade
Tip! A reflection on the absurdity of life with its paradoxical contrapositions: light and darkness, peace and despair, joy and sadness, all mixed together in a chaotic and ridiculous "circus", where, inexplicably, we all find ourselves in. The undeniable overwhelming beauty of it all is a constant source of puzzlement and delight where laughter always finds its way.
Raga Yaman
Pandit Uday Bhawalkar is an Indian Hindustani vocalist. He is an exponent of the dhrupad genre. Uday Bhawalkar is a standard bearer for Dhrupad, and a strong force in its growing recognition and popularity. Uday believes that when immersed in the note and raga, the self disappears and music takes on its own existence; the principle of ‘darshan’. These values are helping him on the path of devotion to Dhrupad. Dhrupad is one of the oldest forms of North Indian classical music and Uday maintains i…
Duo Live 1995
This is the long-awaited new CD release of percussionist Masahiko Togashi's previously unreleased recordings, supervised by Mitsuhiko Sato. In this ultimate performance, Yuji Takahashi steps away from playing computer and synthesizer and randomly utters texts he has written (mostly from his own book "Kafka"), while Togashi responds with perfectly tuned percussion. This is the ultimate performance, a century-old discovery that shines brilliantly in the history of free music.
Live 1989
Third volume of Masahiko Togashi archives features a concert by a trio consisting of Masahiko Togashi, Haruna Miyake, and Yuji Takahashi held on July 8, 1989 at Fukaya Egg Farm. Supervised by Masahiko Satoh.
Bioelectrical Music
*Limited edition of 100 numbered copies, already sold-out at source. 3CD box set plus a Blu-ray of Bioelectrical Films and 44 page booklet* We have not had a physical release by composer and ecologist Michael Prime since the release of Borneo in 2007. This new 3CD set brings us up to date with a series of recordings from across the years. It also sees a new refinement in his working practice as well as a new extension to his original name. Bioelectrical Music by Michael Allen Z Prime consists of…
Jasper Sits Out
From Lawrence English: "A few years ago, my dear friend and bandmate Jamie Stewart and I were talking about Swans. I started to mention how much I admired the utterly personal approach to guitar that Norman Westberg had developed on those early records and moreover how that had blossomed out so richly on this latest incarnation of the band. During the course of the conversation Jamie mentioned a CDR that Norman had passed to him, which collected a few pieces of solo work that Norman had been wor…
Mirror
2023 Stock. Drawing deeply on the earliest recorded period of Japan’s history, the Kofun era, Chihei Hatakeyama’s Mirror meditates on the importance placed on reflection during this age. The mirror was a source of great inspiration, not only as a metaphor for the sun, but also for its ability to shift and reflect light from one location to another. This act of transplanting light, considered almost magical by many during that time.
Similarly, this idea of reflection spurred Hatakeyama to underta…
Formally Haywire
*100 copies limited edition. Totally sold out at source. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing.* The latest mysterious musical missive from these soundohm faves, NYC's psychedelic improv free rock explorationists No Neck Blues Band, a reference whenever we need to describe some sort of tribal freeform psychedelia or jazzy abstract drift, or dirgey home-brewed free form minimalism, or pretty much any stop in between, these guys are the modern mas…
Mass Observation (Expanded)
2023 stock. From Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud: "There were three performers and one witness. I can remember this day well, even though it was some twenty-four years ago. Standing up before a mixing desk in a dark room in an apartment in South London, Jim O'Rourke, Robert Hampson, and myself, literally all hands-on deck as we each took responsibility for the faders on the desk. Introducing sounds to the mix, the accident reigned supreme. Sometimes the high frequency of cellular noise would pervade …